Performance evaluation of gauze packing for liquid desiccant dehumidification system

Abstract

Desiccant systems have found applications in a very large variety of industrial and daily usage products including the new HVAC installations. The dehumidifier is one of the essential parts of those systems, which severely affects the whole system performance. This paper theoretically and experimentally studies the performance of the cross flow dehumidifier, which has been less studied than the counter flow dehumidifier, although it is more applicable in practice. Channel gauze structured packing was used in the dehumidifier and a LiCl aqueous solution was used as the liquid desiccant. The humidity reduction and dehumidifier effectiveness were adopted as the dehumidifier performance indices. The effects of the dehumidifier inlet parameters, including inlet air and desiccant flow rates, inlet air and desiccant temperature, inlet desiccant concentration and inlet air humidity ratio, on the two indices were investigated. The characteristics of the dehumidifier performance agreed well with the other studies reported in the open literature.